Hand held, lightweight hair dryers have become extremely popular and are well known in the art. In the common household, these hand held dryers have replaced, the bonnet-type hair dryers now normally only associated with hair salons or similar commercial establishments. Moreover, many hair salons use the bonnet type hair dryers only for special treatments, and increasingly use portable hand held hair dryers to achieve both speed and flexibility for the customer. Initially, the hand held hair dryers could not produce the desired heat generated by bonnet-type hair dryers, but in recent years have been able to produce comparable amounts of heated air.
The obvious advantages to the hand held hair dryers is their portable nature and low cost relative to the bulky bonnet-type hair dryers. Hand held hair dryers commonly have an ergonomic shape to fit in the palm of the hand and, due to plastics technology, are extremely lightweight. However, a primary advantage still accompanied with the bonnet type hair dryers is that the hands are free to utilize the various accessories available for manipulating the hair during drying.
During the recent growth of these hand held hair dryers, users have been trying to incorporate this primary advantage of the bonnet-type hair dryers without losing the portability and low cost of the hand held hair dryers. Numerous inventions have been devised to take the place of the hands while operating the hand held hair dryers. U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,225,106, 4,278,223, 4,466,203, 4,712,313, 5,636,815 and 5,737,847 disclose various stands for hair dryers. These stands or holders have several undesirable features and disadvantageous which have limited their acceptance in the marketplace. Most of these stands are complex, employing either a "jaw" type or other clamping device to lock the hair dryer in place. All of these devices are limited in their ability to easily move the hair dryer to a selected position as periodically determined by the user. Some of the devices are dependent on being mounted to a chair or wall, and are thus not self-supporting. Other support stands require a specially configured hair dryer, and are not easily useable with the vast bulk of differently configured hair dryers already in the marketplace.
The disadvantages of the prior art are overcome by the present invention, and an improved self-supporting telescopically adjusting stand for selectively positioning a conventional hand held hair dryer is hereinafter disclosed. None of the prior art disclose or suggest the unique combination of features set forth in the present invention.